Britain eyes welfare cuts to tackle surge in youth unemployment

LONDON: Faisa Omar applied for more than 500 jobs in the UK and got nowhere — a slog she likened to “shouting into the void”.

It took a 10-week training course, tailored to the green energy sector, to finally land her a job within a month. Her story is one the Labour government hopes to replicate on a much bigger scale, as it prepares to receive a report and proposals next week that would, controversially, restrict youth sickness and disability benefits in order to fund back-to-work programmes aimed at the nearly 1 million young people not in work, education or training.

Britain had 981,000 people aged 16-24 not in employment, education or training (NEET) in the second quarter of this year, accounting for 13 percent of the age group as a whole and a share that was the second-highest in Europe last year.

Its 15.6 percent youth unemployment rate is also unusually high compared with the 3.4 percent rate for older workers — elsewhere in Europe, the youth jobless rate is typically only just over double that of older age groups. Former minister Alan Milburn, a party ally of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, warned of a “lost generation” in May in the first part of his report into youth unemployment. Disagreement is likely to arise over Milburn’s plans for how to fund more back-to-work programmes against a backdrop of stretched public finances, something he addressed in a newspaper interview on Thursday. “I’m not saying that any of this will be easy, or that it will be pain-free,” Milburn told the Times. “Candidly, it could mean that some people will get less financial support.”

Milburn said earlier this year that he wanted to shift the 25-to-1 ratio of spending on benefits versus employment support more towards the latter, and draw lessons from the Netherlands and elsewhere where more young people are in work.